Every time Elon Musk and SpaceX manage to land a used Falcon 9 rocket on one of the company’s two droneships, it’s a huge achievement. It’s pretty easy to see that getting anything into space and then back again is tough, let alone putting a tube-shaped rocket on a droneship the size of a football field in the middle of the ocean, but most of the pictures of SpaceX landings don’t give you a good sense of scale. It’s easy to look at them and forget that Falcon 9 rockets are really, really dang big.

The most recent version of the Falcon 9 is 230 feet high, or a little more than 70 yards — it’s basically two thirds of a football field standing on its end, or the same height as a fourteen or so story building in a big city.

Mind officially blown.

Updating to add: I was wrong when I said I’d had no idea – I did have any idea once but then I forgot about it. Back in 2015. Dave Ricks reminded me. That too is a fun watch!

Sadly, Trump and other scientifically illiterate people take possession of these great feats as if it is his America that is responsible for it. Religion usurps science and engineering in a similar manner, discarding what it does not like.

Musk, incidentally, is an immigrant from a shithole country. I live among some truly benighted people who would do well to look around at the people who do great things in our world and where they come from.

Note that – this time – they lost the center core which was supposed to land on the drone ship. That’s after an unbroken string of 19 successful recovery landings, plus 2 successful highly experimental non-recovery landings in the ocean, since the last landing failure in June 2016.

That was the only thing to go wrong in the mission, and landing an orbital-class first stage is something that’s considered so hard that no other rocket company has ever even attempted it before. Moreover, they know the cause, which was that they didn’t have enough of the special “start-up” chemical that they use to light the main fuel of the rocket for the various burns (liftoff burn, boostback burn, re-entry burn, and landing burn). So, it’s just a matter of making sure they have more of a reserve of that stuff in the future.

@Jim Baerg #2 – the article has a point, but pointing at SpaceX is to some degree an example of suvivorship bias.

If you look at Blue Origin, they’ve been going since 2000, are currently spending $1Bn/year on development, are nowhere near SpaceX, and New Glenn which is currently scheduled to be operational the year after SLS Block 1 will have a lower launch capacity.

And if you look at all the failed “New Space” ventures over the last 20 years, and factor in the development costs of all the private sector companies which didn’t make it, making a rocket is *hard*, and the US *needed* to guarantee its own access to space. There’s no way it could have forseen that SpaceX would have succeeded, and if Falcon 1 flight 4 had failed like the three before it, SpaceX would have been another $400M of dot-com money thrown away in a failed vanity project.

I think Musk is a fricking genius who’s done amazing things, and who I hope continues to do amazing things, but that’s not always enough, and he’s had some good luck at times that he’s needed it.

The US government has not had the luxury of being able to fund a dozen small space ventures to see which one(s) play out, like the private sector, or the luxury of relying on luck. To *guarantee* access to space does, in fact, cost a lot of money. And note that you can’t rely on private companies for that. As far as I’m aware, it’s possible for SpaceX (or any other provider) to decline to accept (or simply not bid for) any payload it chooses, including government contracts. If private launch companies have relatively full rosters of private communication/broadcast satellites, they may decide that they don’t want to help governments launch spy sats, either for political reasons, or to cut down on all the extra damn paperwork that comes with those things. For that reason, and others, the government needs its own launch capability.

I hope that the US government continues to use Falcon over SLS where it is economical for them to do so, in the same way that they currently use Falcon over Delta IV. But I don’t see them scrapping SLS, or see keeping it as necessarily evidence of “waste and corruption”.

I shan’t link to it because, well, you all know where to find it, but PZ put up a grudging post about this (he really hates Musk), and the comments are….typical. Some rightly give credit where it’s due but, possibly to appease the master, there is a certain level of ‘meh’, ‘it’s ancient Chinese technology’, ‘Musk is an egotistical wanker who’s going to pollute Mars with his Tesla car*’, and so on.